GoDaddy Loses Thousands of Domains After SOPA Opinions

From DailyTech: GoDaddy recently lost thousands of domains after showing its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and now, customers and competitors are accusing the service of delaying domain transfers in an effort to hold on to what business it has left.

GoDaddy, an Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company, caught a lot of heat recently after openly supporting SOPA. SOPA, which was introduced in October 2011, is a proposed bill that would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to restrict access to sites accused of enabling copyright infringement, and would also block payment processors and online advertisers from conducting business with the sites. All of this can be done without due process.

GoDaddy received a lot of criticism after revealing its stance on the controversial bill, and attempted to switch sides in an effort to save itself. However, this tactic didn't work. Last Thursday, GoDaddy lost over 15,000 domains and then another 21,054 on Friday. By early Monday morning, GoDaddy had over 37,000 domain transfers.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation -- but we can clearly do better," said Warren Adelman, GoDaddy CEO, in an effort to reverse the company's previous supportive opinion of SOPA. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Some Internet users have not only transferred their domains, but also started creating and using apps like ByeDaddy.org to see who has a domain with GoDaddy. The No. 1 searched domain is Wikipedia.org, which still uses GoDaddy for the time being.

To add insult to injury, GoDaddy customers that are trying to transfer their domains have complained about delays. GoDaddy competitor Namecheap, which is also a domain registrar, even accused the service of delaying domain transfers to make it more difficult for users to leave. According to Namecheap, GoDaddy is "returning incomplete WHOIS information" as part of its transfer process, which violates ICANN rules.

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